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Understanding the impact of substituents on the quantum interference effect at single molecule scale is of great importance for the design of molecular devices. In this work, three platinum(II) complexes with -H, -NH2 and -NO2 groups on conductive backbones were designed and synthesized. Single-molecule conductance, which was measured using scanning tunnelling microscope break junction (STM-BJ) technique, demonstrated a conductance freeze phenomenon under the variation of substituents. Theoretical study revealed that, despite the electronic effect of the substituents shifting the energy level of molecular orbital, the quantum interference effect vanished the influence of electronic effect on the conductance and eventually leaded to the conductance freeze.

Circular polarized luminescence (CPL)-active materials attract great attentions owing to their widely applications in 3D optical displays and encrypted transmission. Inspired by the strategies adopted in perovskite based CPL materials, herein, CPL-active hybrids (D)- and (L)-(tert-butyl prolinate)MnCl

Numerous mononuclear platinum(II) complexes are non-emissive or weakly emissive under ambient conditions, but the corresponding Pt–M (M = Cu(I), Ag(I), Au(I), etc.) heteronuclear assemblies could become intensely luminescent because of the inhibition of non-radiative relaxation and the promotion of intersystem crossing from singlet to triplet state through Pt–M intermetallic interactions. To this end, the fabrication of specifically structured Pt–M complexes by the use of slightly luminescent homonuclear Pt(II) precursors provides a promising approach to switching on phosphorescence as well as modulating emission energy and colour. This feature article is aimed at providing some typical examples for attaining highly phosphorescent Pt–M heteronuclear complexes using homonuclear Pt(II) precursors, focusing on the assembly strategy, the correlation of emissive properties to the structures, and the application of phosphorescence in sensing and light-emitting devices.

Bacillus sphaericus LP1-G, belonging to flagellar serotype H3, has been found to have moderate toxicity against two resistant Culex quinquefasciatus colonies (RLCq1 and RLCq2) and the susceptible contrast (SLCq). With an aim of screening mosquitocidal acting factor, a partial genome library was prepared from a partial HindIII digest of the total DNA from Bacillus sphaericus LP1-G. Two thousand twenty Escherichia coli clones were screened for toxicity against susceptible SLCq, and a toxic clone, designated E-UL68, was chosen for further study. The recombinant E-UL68 performed toxicity against both susceptible and two resistant colonies, having the same level of toxicity as that of wide-type strain LP1-G. Sequence analysis revealed that the inserted fragment was composed of 3876 nucleotides and contained a complete gene, whose sequence was identical to that of the mtx gene from B. sphaericus SSII-1. Because the binary toxin produced during sporulation of strain LP1-G has no activity against the target mosquitoes, this indicates that the Mtx toxin or other active factors might perhaps be responsible for the toxicity of LP1-G against different colonies of mosquito larvae.

Asticcacaulis excentricus, who lives in upper-layer waters providing food resource to the mosquito larvae and has been proven to be a successful host to produce the mosquitocidal binary toxins or Cry11Aa toxin from Bacilli (Liu et al., 1996, Nat Biotech 14: 343; Armengol, et al. , 2005, Curr Microbiol 51: 430), was developed to express cyt1Aa gene from Bacillus thuringiensis subsp. israelensis (Bti). Two A. excentricus transformants were constructed with the attempt of producing CytlAa alone and alongside with Cry11Aa, repectively. Detection of expressed Cry11Aa and CytlAa proteins by immunoblot in the recombinant A. excentricus clones showed that either cry11Aa or cyt1Aa was expressed well solely but not simultaneously although both restriction analyses of plasmid DNA and DNA sequencing showed that the transformed plasmid was identical to scheme. To investigate the reason why the recombinant A. excentricus harboring both genes and their ribosome binding site (RBS) sequences expressed only Cry11Aa, the total RNA of A. excentricus cells was extracted and revealed three-band pattern in which all RNA molecule weights are not greater than 16S RNA of Escherichia coli by formamide agarose gel electrophoresis, indicating that different RNA systems within these two Gram-negative strains required distinguishingly organised constructs to express multiple foreign genes. It is hypothesized that an extra promoter upstream of RBS sequence is required to express cyt1Aa in the cry11Aa-cyt1Aa tandom plasmid.